Customer Reviews

Blind Lake

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Need I say more? Wilson is consistently one of the finest writers in OR OUT of the science-fiction genre, and this book, like several of his previous novels, has been named a "New York Times Notable Book of the Year."

The premise is fascinating, and developed in surprising directions: new quantum-computing technologies allow the imaging of day-to-day life on alien worlds. A pair of US government labs -- Crossbank and Blind Lake -- are devoted to watching the action unfold on two separate extrasolar planets. But suddenly Blind Lake is locked down: no one can get in or out, and no communication with the rest of our world is possible. Why are the all-too-human researchers there being quarantined? And what happend at Crossbank to warrant this?

Beautiful, often poetic prose; finely nuanced characters; science right at the cutting edge; and great metaphysical/philosophical ruminations. What more could one ask? Let's hope this one snares Wilson his well-deserved Hugo and Nebula Awards.

Blind Lake is a military installation set up to observe an alien on a faraway planet through a telescope controlled by a quantum-computer AI. Three journalists, each with their own history, come to Blind Lake to write a magazine piece. Soon after they enter, and without any explanation, the entire complex is quarantined and all contact with the outside world is totally cut off, heightening tensions amongst all in the complex the longer the isolation drags on.

The alien followed by the complex provides the background for the interaction between these three journalists, Marguerite Hauser - a researcher studying the alien's behavior, her psychotic ex-husband who is left in charge of the administration of the complex and their daughter Tess - a loner who is constantly questioned by Mirror Girl, the name she gives to her reflection that keeps on asking her difficult questions.

Some great and original SF, while at the same time giving life to the characters and not losing tempo with the stoyyline. Highly recommended!

Blind Lake is a typical Robert Charles Wilson novel, and I mean that in the most positive way. It is a masterful blend of hard sci-fi and human interest, of cosmic ideas playing out in the lives of real, accessible people. It is a balancing act few writers can pull off, but Wilson has honed the art to perfection.

The story is set in the near future. Blind Lake is a government research lab devoted to processing images captured by a space-based interferometric telescope array powerful enough to see the surface of planets around neighboring stars. A set of self-evolving quantum computers called "O/BECs" are brought in to enhance the signal. They succeed to the point where scientists on Earth use "the Eye" to follow the day to day life of a sentient alien, "the Subject," who lives on a planet in Ursa Majoris. However, the code has evolved beyond human comprehension. Things take a spooky turn when the telescopic array breaks down beyond repair, but the images from Ursa Majoris continue to flow... Without warning or explanation, all contact is severed between Blind Lake and the outside world. Why? What is happening outside? And what, if anything, does it have to do with the Eye?

What makes Wilson so successful is his ability to wrap big ideas like this into a genuine, human story. We view the events at Blind Lake through the eyes of Chris, a journalist with baggage; Marguerite, a mid-level researcher; Ray, her obsessive ex-husband, now chief administrator of the facility; and Tessa, their daughter, a quiet girl who seems to be hearing voices. Their stories provide the canvas on which the larger events take place. The characters are rounded and natural, with quirks, viewpoints, and histories all their own. And the same goes for the Subject and his world. You understand these people, and you go through the experience with them.

The best part, though, is the writing. Admit it: science fiction writers are great with ideas, but when it comes to aesthetics, most are merely adequate. Wilson, however, is amazing. His effortless prose can capture the subtleties of mood or emotion, or even the weather, in compact but exquisite detail. I often found myself rereading paragraphs just to savor his lyrical use of language.

I highly recommend Blind Lake. There's not a lot of action, but you will enjoy a story that is intelligent and nuanced.

Robert Charles Wilson is a gifted writer of science fiction novels and short stories. He can also be sloppy and careless. "Blind Lake" should have been a first-rate novel, but it is badly flawed.

The character development is excellent, for the most part, but Wilson does some surprisingly dumb things, making mistakes that his editor at Tor should have caught. One of the principal characters is Tessa, an eleven-year-old girl. It is October, and Tessa is in the eighth grade. I found this mistake to be jarring. I'd pictured Tessa as an eleven-year-old sixth grader. She could have been in seventh grade if her twelfth birthday was approaching within a few months, but not in eighth. So how do we picture this child, who happens to be crucial to the story? Sixth graders and eighth graders, eleven-year-olds and thirteen-year-olds, are very different. Wilson's sloppiness continues. Mr. Fleischer is Tessa's home room teacher, we are told, but he seems to be the only teacher she has, certainly the most important. And then Wilson has her cutting paper with "safety scissors." Kindergarten? We are then taken to the other extreme, when Tessa's mother wonders if her teacher has introduced her to the concept of quantum uncertainty. With this kind of writing, the willing suspension of disbelief collapses.

Unfortunately, Wilson is guilty of a much more serious breach of the reader's trust. The plot is based on an intriguing concept, but one that goes nowhere. In the not-too-distant future, a new kind of computer architecture is invented, one that develops and evolves on its own after the "start" button, in effect, is pushed. The device, which comes to be known as "the eye," enables humanity to observe a being on a distant planet, from what seems to be a distance of just a few feet. The planet is more than fifty light years from Earth, and Wilson makes a point of having his highly articulate characters explain that all observations are of events that occurred more than fifty years ago. But later in the novel, Wilson has his human characters interacting with the alien in real time. No explanation is offered.

In what should have been a blazingly dramatic development, leading to the climax of the story, some huge and strange objects begin to turn up in various locations on Earth. They appear to be self-generating devices akin to the Eye. Humanity may be about to fulfill its potential as a part of the life of the universe, on levels ranging from contact with aliens to contact with a universal intelligence. Wilson presents us with this idea, and then lets it drop. The book ends as though he got interested in something beside writing this novel, tacked on a few concluding pages, and was done with it.

His readers deserve better.

A consistent theme that runs through Robert Charles Wilson's novels is that people carry on. Inexplicable events occur but people must still get by from day to day, and their struggles for normalcy actually lend even greater credence to the speculative science that Wilson explores.

Consciousness is at the core of "Blind Lake": is consciousness a self-organizing manifestation of the quantum foam, able to tunnel instantly below time and space? And if it is, how would we perceive it? The characters in "Blind Lake" perceive it as an accidental discovery, the ability of powerful computers to extrapolate and refine data from telescopes into images of clarity from the surfaces of worlds thousands of light years away. How the computers do this is not understood, but the images are there nonetheless.

As time goes by, though, there are perturbations and glitches in the computers; aliens on distant worlds seem to know that they are being observed, and these observations seem to take on the need to fall back from the scientific method and into narrative for interpretation--where science seeks to explain, narrative embeds memory as a means of communication across time and space.

These concepts are deep, but Wilson leads the reader in step by step through the normal struggles and trials of his characters. This keeps "Blind Lake" from running away with itself, and provides a story that is fast-paced and entertaining. But the story ends too quickly. Even though Wilson's concepts come across clearly by the end of the book, the emotional need for narrative fulfillment is cut short. There was just a bit more story to tell.

I just finished Blind Lake, and I enjoyed the book very much, but with a few reservations.

The story begins with journalists visiting a scientific research facility-- an image of the surface of another planet is being studied at this facility. Specifically, a living creature of another species is being tracked hour by hour, and day by day.

The problem is that even the scientists do not understand their own technology. Self-programming computers of incredible power have driven this observational system, which is not really telescopic in nature.

A key to understanding some of the book's themes comes in a peculiar debate midway through the book. Ray and Marguerite, two scientists with important roles in the project, conduct a public debate before an auditorium of people. Ray suggests something remarkable-- that intuition is akin to dream, and that the supercomputers processing the image are really dreaming. Might the free-form thought of incredibly powerful and self-programming computers take on an aspect of a "reality dream?"

Early on, the scientists admit they do not understand aspects of the experiment, but -- at first -- they are able to take comfort in applying many principles of relativity physics-- discussing the nature of space and time as portrayed in relativity theory. But they become more and more bewildered as impossible things begin happening. Increasingly, they are forced to admit that the paradigms of science are just NOT explaining the Blind Lake project.

This unraveling of our contemporary scientific comfort is a chief part of the impact of this book. And if reality is beginning to blur with dream, the dream coming forward in the novel becomes more and more akin to a nightmare. There's a chilling quality to the book, suggested by its very grim title. The name of the scientific facility, Blind Lake, is symbolic of the "benefits" of a materialistic, agnostic sort of modern science.

The characterization was interesting and good, with one exception. Ray, the adversarial and difficult ex-husband of Marguerite, seems to become a kind of one-dimensional villain and all-purpose punching bag by the end of the book.

The conclusion of the book brings in too much unneeded smoke and mirrors--a kind of "deus ex machina" of wonderous and spectacular events and effects. But the story doesn't need these. They tend to distract and conflict with the real resolution of the book on the level of the characters, and in terms of the plot's logic.

All in all, a very interesting and stimulating book. I read it in two days, staying up late at night. So for me at least, in addition to the "echoes" the book created in me, it came to be a page turner as well.

Patrick Callahan

BLIND LAKE is billed as "Intense, absorbing, memorable" and "A superior sf thriller". Excuse me? Thriller? I certainly didn't think so. Too bad, too, because it could have been. It starts with the mysterious and sudden isolation of a scientific installation that, through an inexplicable technology, is observing life on a distant planet. As the story progresses, some interesting philosophical questions are raised regarding the difficulties of understanding and relating to totally alien beings, their culture and their actions. In addition, beyond the larger issues, there is a personal drama involving some of the people trapped inside the installation.

The story progresses nicely through most of the book. Tension mounts as the human conflicts intensify, "mirror girl" makes her presence felt, and the alien's behavior remains unclear. As BLIND LAKE reaches its end, however, Wilson simply lets the air out of the balloon. The human dramas are resolved easily and neatly (too easily and neatly?) while the rest is just left hanging. Exactly who was "mirror girl" and why did she appear, what are the structures, what is their purpose and their origin, and what was the meaning of the alien's ordeal?

This is the second book I've read by Wilson. DARWINIA was the first. Both start with engaging situations, but both suffer from weak endings. Questions of what happened and why are simply left unresolved. Further, these larger issues become so distant and esoteric that the reader scarcely cares about them in any case. BLIND LAKE is an entertaining story that's brought down by a totally inadequate finish. It's a weak three stars by my reckoning. I can't recommend it, nor will I be reading any other books by this author any time soon.

For about the first three quarters of Blind Lake I was very intrigued with the story and the mystery behind what was happening. A community of researchers are practicing the "New Astronomy," a technology they don't really understand, which allows them to not just view other another world as through a telescope, but which allows them to view individuals on that world going about their daily lives. Very early on the entire community is suddenly cut off from the outside world and no one is permitted to enter or leave.

At first this is extremely interesting. We have the mystery of why they are locked in and the science fiction element of viewing the other world. I might have had a higher opinion of this novel except that I had fairly recently read Under the Dome by Stephen King, another novel where a community is cut off from the outside world. King has an ability to flesh out his characters and make you believe the situation, regardless of what paranormal causes are underlying. I found that disappointingly lacking in this story. The characters are not very interesting, and several are downright cliché (the ex-husband and the little girl to name just two). All which could have been forgiven had the two most interesting elements of the story, the lockdown and The Subject, been given their due. Unfortunately it seems as if Wilson, possibly in an effort to keep the novel shorter, merely touched on both of them, resolving each in what I found to be a rather unsatisfying way. Which is a shame. One of the most intriguing things about astronomy is what it would be like on other worlds where intelligent life exists. We are, late in the novel, given a very superficial glimpse at the evolutionary history of The Subject's people, but as they are not really the central characters of the story we are left without much more than that. And while the back of the book labels Blind Lake as a "thriller," I was not held in much suspense, either. Often times the book will end a chapter with somewhat of a cliffhanger, only to have the next chapter pick up a week or so later and the backtrack and tell you what happened. I usually like this kind of storytelling, but I found it to interrupt the flow of the plot.

I shouldn't be too hard on the book. Wilson does tell intriguing stories, but I should know what to expect. Two other books of his that I read, Darwinia and The Chronoliths, are both similar in that they introduce something radical into the normal world and then document how people react to it. The focus is rarely on the cause and is usually on the effect. In any case, I will still continue to read his books as I find that he usually introduces concepts that are designed to make you think.

This is the first book I ever read by this author, and I picked it up based solely on the cover art; which shows an alien on a distant planet. Usually this is a mistake. This time I hit the jackpot. I am recommending this book to everyone. It is the only realistic explanation I have ever read of alien contact, The descriptions in this book are fantastic, artistic, thoughtful, memorable, and melancholy ( in a good way ). You will find yourself highliting, circling, underlining whole passages from this book; it is that good! The usual storyline, involving a few people needed to draw us in and help us to relate, is perfectly linked to the bigger story; woven perfectly together with it and culminating seamlessly with it. There is so much good writing here that you will be astounded. A lengthy passage about ape's dreaming and how that compares with human problem-solving is unexpected, written into the storyline so that it not only makes sense in terms of the bigger story...; it also defines the characters and moves the action along. If you are expecting chase scenes, fights, daring escapes, or rocketships... look elsewhere. This story is believable, thought-provoking, different, sweet, romantic, mind-boggling, and grand. I read a few of the bad reviews and it sounds as if they were talking about some other story; they seemed to have completely missed some of the BEST passages and most-thoughtful ideas. If you need some point of comparison to something more popular, think of Stephen King's movie THE MIST... but take away the monsters, the action, and the gore. Keep the discussions of humanity, religion, love, hope... and tweak the idea of some sort of doorway to another dimension into an idea of a distant planet and a specific alien crossing over briefly to touch someone on Earth... and tell the story in a believable way with realistic dialogue. I am trying to whet your appetite to convince you to read this book. You will be glad.

The scientists in the Blind Lake research facility monitor life on another planet. Using technology they do not truly understand, they watch a being on a world fifty light years distant as it goes through its daily life. When the facility suddenly goes into a strict lockdown mode, things begin to change.

This story centers on a scientist, her controlling, violent ex-husband, her troubled daughter and a boarder in her home.

While none of Wilson's books are what I would call 'typical' science fiction, they are thoughtful,intelligent and interesting. In it, he examined the role of humanity among the stars, the way one culture interprets another and does a good job with the characters.

While I did not consider this his best, I did enjoy reading this one.